experimental
See: Rachika Nayar explores the brittle, fleeting beauty of looped guitars on ‘clarity’ ahead of her EP for RVNG Intl
HERE at Backseat Mafia, we’ve loved the brittle, pretty guitar experimenta of New York’s Rachika Nayar for a good while; check our write-ups for a brace of single drops from her album for NNA Tapes at the beginning of the year, the otherworldly fire of “Losing Too Is Still Ours” and the potency of “The …
Album Review: Murena Murena- Take Care of Me
Some records take a few spins to sink in. Like a good book or a good film, the true personality of the work exists in layers: sometimes they are layers of interpretation, other times they are simply layers of sound or images. Given that Daniel Murena is a soundtrack composer, it’s no surprise that his …
Track: Slip inside the gorgeous, dubby blur of ‘The Visitant’ as Scottish ambient duo Cahill/Costello announce an enthralling debut album
KEVIN DANIEL CAHILL and Graham Costello, guitarist and drummer respectively, first set off on the path that would lead to them wedding as a musical act with an oblique and rapturous aesthetic when they met at Glasgow’s prestigious Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, at which Kevin was pursuing a classical music education and Graham, jazz; they …
See: Sølyst brings a playful, fractured machine-dub-pop with ‘Hold’ ahead of his August album
THOMAS KLEIN, otherwise drummer for the fine post- and krautrock rhythmic venturers Kriedler, also has a natty occasional sideline as Sølyst, wearing which hat he strides out with an album every year or three; August’s Spring will be his fourth album in eleven years, and collates together recordings he’s made over the past three. Not …
Track: Swiss post-rock trio HOLM bring the shimmer and the dapple to ‘Flickering Leaves’: a second, impressionistic step towards their 2022 album
WITH a months-long concept of dropping one single track every month on the pilgrimage towards their 2022 album, Swiss post-rock trio HOLM have followed up the cinematic and metronomic wash of May’s “Our Days And Years” with a second station of the cross for you to sonically supplicate before, “Flickering Leaves”, which we’ve got right …
Album review: Adam Stafford – ‘Trophic Asynchrony’: Falkirk composer moves to a deep, cyclical set of formal minimalism to address the ecological state we’re in
FALKIRK’S Adam Stafford, the film-maker and folk artist whose lockdown notebook album Diamonds Of A Horse Famine we warmly embraced here last summer – not least because it contained the free-associating “Erotic Thistle” and its fantastic line, “melt down my death mask to fashion it into a dildo” (read our full review here) – has returned …
Track: Arandel celebrates the release of ‘InBach vol.2’ with the stirring space pop of ‘Fabula’
ARANDEL, the French artist whose album of expansions and reinterpretations – often, complete genre reshapings – of the works of the great Johann Sebastian, InBach, received deserved acclaim upon its release early last year, is looking to repeat that cultural success with a second volume released today. With that album out to purchase right now, …
See: Bureau B tease for the Faust boxset with unreleased cine footage from Gunther Wüsthoff to accompany ‘Fernlicht’, from the mythical ‘Punkt’ album
WITH the recent news that Hamburg’s excellent imprint Bureau B is marking the half-century of Faust with a box set entitled Faust 1971-1974 in October (and already available to order – for details see below, as this isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to delay on), the label has this very morning released a video for …
News: Black Dice fire back into the ring with their first album in nearly a decade; watch the video for ‘White Sugar’
BLACK DICE, the dub motorik sonic sprites who came blasting out of Rhode Island before the turn of the century with awe-inspiring drone-percussive mantras such as “Endless Happiness”, are back in the rung, gloved up, with a new album entitled Mod Prog Sic due on a new label, FourFour Records, at the start of October. …
Track: Typical Sisters splice Tortoise’s rhythmic precision to the trippy deep-space glow of Stones Throw on ‘Grains’
WITH their new album, Love Beam, out in just under three weeks – and following our premiere of their last single, the brightly rhythmic and curious “Recurring Memory” last month – read that here – Typical Sisters are mixing it up with hallucinatory abandon on their final preluding single, “Grains”, which you can hear below. …